The kingdom of Letthe Mallo, having enjoyed a long, peaceful, prosperous spell, was now facing the troubles of war. News reported from the battlefields were not reassuring, and the latest dispatches told of an enemy army marching right to the capital, ready to conquer it.

The beautiful and beloved queen, sitting on her throne, looked uneasy; just a few days before, the bordering kingdom had broken a century long peace by unexpectedly attacking a bordering village with their large army; and from there, they had marched toward the middle of the country, where the capital laid.

“Mother,” said Ludovica, the young princess. “We can’t let the enemy reach us. You know how I hold within myself the power to stop them; why don’t you send me to the front line? You know better than I do that our army is not adequate to protect our castle.”

"Ludovica," said the queen; "you must stay here, for you are the princess and not a common soldier. You cannot be allowed to leave the castle to humble yourself on the battlefield, and more importantly, you cannot be allowed to use what we all know are forbidden spells."

“But mother,” said the princess. “The castle is said to fall before tomorrow according to the latest accounts. Our stillness is shaping to be our downfall.”

“Listen not to the exaggerated cries that come from men whose morale has been thwarted by a single defeat. Our empire shall not fall at the hands of our evil neighbors," sanctioned the queen.

“If that is what you believe, then why is your face so tense? Why are you not as perfectly calm and collected as you always are when you sit on your beautiful throne?"

"I will not hear any more from you, my young child. You are to leave this room, and go back to that which compels you; which are not the matters of war."

Ludovica couldn’t do anything else but leave her room. A frown on her face, she returned to her activities of reading and practicing her singing; but she could not do so with tranquillity, as the terrible premonitions of what could have happened in the following days haunted her mind.

It was later, in the quiet hour of the night, that a visit that addressed her uneasiness finally came to her. One of the army generals had hastily returned from the battleground, miraculously fleeing from the enemy onslaught; and confirmed with the crowds around the castle that the decisive attack from the enemy army was supposed to happen the following day.

It was then that the princess received a visit. It was Mercurius, an old attendant from the castle, who came to her at the hour in which she was supposed to sleep.

He bowed deeply before her and spoke. “Princess, it is not with ease that I come before you, for I realize this treason will cost me my livelihood and perhaps, my entire life. But, on the night before the supposed fall of our castle, I cannot let myself remain inert, even if that means betraying the orders of our queen. If you, my beloved princess, will agree, like I think you will, I will escort you to the woods west of the castle, where you will be able to perform your magic to fight the evil empire that wants us destroyed.”

Ludovica was obviously ready for action. “Let us go, my dear Mercurius. Let us reach the woods that you speak of,” said the graceful princess.

*

The two spent the next hour traveling, reaching the quiet woods west of the castle. The night was clear, and a beautiful moon graced the starry sky; all in all, the ideal condition for Ludovica’s magic spells to function to the best of their capabilities. The princess was escorted by Mercurius himself and two guards from the castle who agreed, as most, with the general plan of action.

“You might not hear from me again,” said the old man as the small caravan stopped. “Or of these brave men here. We are ready to pay for our misbehavior, but although we may be faltering before our majesty, our hearts tell us that, given the exceptional circumstances that we found ourselves in, this was the most correct course of action for us to have acted upon.”

"You must not be afraid, for I will do everything in my power to keep you in the clear,” said Ludovica. “Now tell me everything that I need to know, before it’s too late, so that I can face our brutal enemy with the utmost efficiency.”

“The enemy camp,” said one of the guards. “Is about ten miles west from here. You will need to walk toward the river until you see the fire of their temporary dwellings. It is large, unbelievably so, for such is the force that they have summoned in hope of vanquishing our defenses. But that is not going to represent trouble in the face of your powers, princess.”

“We believe they are gone to begin their assault before dawn,” said the other. “So if we must attack, the best time to do so is now; for our strike would surprise them in their sleep, making it inconvenient for them to attack back or flee.”

"I thank you both for your explanations,” solemnly said the young woman. “Now,” she added as she looked at them, one by one, in the eyes, “Get away, before something happens to you.”

The three men bowed before the princess and climbed on their horses. They left the woods as fast as they could, to let Ludovica exercise her magic power to her will.

In the cold air of the night, the young princess removed her dress, then let her undergarments fall to the ground as well, until she stood, perfectly bare, in the middle of the quiet wood. And then: she grew.

Gradually but quickly, she reached a size one hundred times her own. And as the trees began to crumble at her feet and the animals started escaping, she rose into the moonlit sky. Not wishing to damage the beautiful woods further, she stepped out into the prairie; and from there, she started her brief walk to the enemy camp.

*

Thousands of men woke up to the sound of her footsteps and the screams of their fellow soldiers on guard duty. She had come to them, in the darkness of the night, as undetected as a 160 meters tall being possibly could; and she had started shattering their little tents, dispersing their fires, and generally wreaking havoc on the large encampment as best as she possibly could. Her foot made short work of their frail little bodies, and their weapons could not do anything but lightly scratch her thick skin.

“I am sorry to have to do this, for you are only executing your evil ruler’s orders; but it is my duty to protect my kingdom in the moment of need,” she whispered to the wind, which ran chilly on her uncovered skin.

Those who could fled from the camp and ran from where they came to the nearby villages they had attacked hours before. But hundreds died instantly, stepped on by the girl who made sure to catch the most of them under her foot.

Ludovica felt one tent after another pop under her feet, and the weak bodies of the soldiers crush satisfyingly under her weight. Yes, despite her words of regret, it was with delight that she executed her revenge. Thinking of the innocent lives of the people in her kingdom these very soldiers had wasted, she felt no remorse imposing her feet on them. Instead, she even felt joy. She felt like a pristine heroine delivering the evildoers a rightful defeat; she believed that she was carrying her royal duties to her little kingdom.

The first lights of the dawn had started gracing the night sky, turning the blue night to a lighter tone. Ludovica had paced two times through the whole camp, humongous in size but to her a walk as brief as the one from her bedroom to the closest flight of stairs.

The giantess, aided by the light of the coming morning, observed what was left of the camp she had been stomping, and felt content with her rampage. She finished a few of the soldiers she had left injured; she caught a few of those that were still hiding and punished them with her foot; and decided to leave alone those that were retreating, rather than following them to the nearby villages, risking to cause further damage to her kingdom’s lands.

In seeing one of the last puny insect-like soldiers cowering on the ground by her feet, she decided to pick the tiny person up; and after briefly looking around, she decided to let herself indulge in a fantasy she had been having from the moment she had been thinking about growing to face the enemy forces on the battlefield.

She brought the tiny soldier in front of her mouth, deprived him of the armor he was wearing, and then, after opening up her lips and covering him in the breeze of her breath, she tossed him in.

Savoring his taste for a brief moment, she swallowed. And the poor boy, nothing but an eighteen-year-old forced on the battlefield by the king's aggressive recruiting policies, could do nothing but uselessly struggle as he slid through Ludovica’s throat. His brief passage inside her mouth was the first kiss he had received, and also the last; and that it turned out to be from a most beautiful young woman, and a princess none the less, served at least as a brief consolation to the young boy.

"You should be honored to serve as a princess's meal," were her words, merely whispered as she felt the tiny soldier nourish her hungry body. Her act did not merely satisfy, in fact, the curiosity of feeling how a tiny human would taste, but it also fulfilled a hunger that grew through her because of the sleepless and tiring night she had endured.

And so, looking for more food, she started catching the remaining soldiers she found on the camp; her fingers picked them up from under their tents where they desperately hid and brought them to her mouth, where they were barely chewed and mostly swallowed whole, as she would rather not feel their bloody insides on her tongue; she inserted every live one she could find into her mouth, but she left alone those that were already dead, not wanting to swallow what had been trampled by her dirty feet.

*

Having had the most unusual breakfast in her life, the princess decided to tread back to her castle. She was supposed to meet Mercurius and the others in the same spot in the woods where they departed the previous night; and so she walked there, the weight of tiredness upon her as the excitement had started to wear off and, wishing for nothing more than her bed, and with the notion that she would not be forced out of there by enemy invaders, she reached for the woods.

But as she walked on the path that led there, she saw tiny things scurrying by her feet; they were people riding on horses, and she almost stumbled in making sure that they wouldn't end underfoot.

Seeing that the horses stopped before her toes, she looked at the tiny figures on the ground and recognized Mercurius's long purple vest.

"Mercurius," said the princess, "why are you running there, are you not afraid of ending up under my foot?"

Realizing she couldn’t understand what he said, she picked him up and brought him closer to her face.

"Princess!" screamed the tiny man, held by Ludovica's thumb and index. "The enemy has deceived us! The camp we have sent you to was but a mere distraction! The true army was placed on a different front, and is marching to our capital in this very moment! We must rush if we want them to be stopped!”

Ludovica, having heard of the urgency of the situation, asked the old man for the location of the battlefield site; and once she formed a clear idea of the place in her mind, she started walking in that direction.

It was a short walk to the giant princess, but it wasn’t devoid of anguish. She could see the castle, which she now surpassed in height, and the city before it. She knew that everyone in her kingdom was going to know about the day she marched, in the full glory of her naked body, in front of the capital.

Let them see her, then, and let them feast their eyes on her beauty; for beautiful she was, the princess, and her body was alluring even at her normal size; but now that she had turned into a being larger than most, she was without a doubt the most awe-inspiring spectacle everyone of her faithful subjects had ever, and could ever, witness.

People in the city climbed to their house's roof to see her walk in front of the city walls. Soldiers saw her coming from a distance, and panicked; but some of them rejoiced and cheered for their princess. And the queen saw her too, and enraged, she fumed at the child that had dared to betray her will.

But Ludovica was unstoppable now. The feeble arrows the enemy archers launched in her direction couldn’t stop the determined young woman. The lances, the swords and the maces of the enemy fighters were barely felt by her foot, which was the only part of her body they could reach.

“Run away, my soldiers,” she said as she arrived. “Let me handle this battle, for I will easily emerge victorious, and run to safety, to your families and loved ones”.

Then, she imposed her foot on a group of enemy soldiers that was bravely advancing to attack her foot. She kept stepping through the ranks of the enemies, flattening them with ease, as if she was walking in a garden full of dead leaves. She felt their bodies snap, their bones pop, and their lives give in, and this only enhanced her resolve to go through the multitudes of bodies. They were thousands, maybe tens of thousands, but their numbers could never make up for her size. A single step of hers could squish dozens of them like insects, and she had been stepping continuously for minutes now.

The battlefield was turning into a graveyard. Now that the superiority of the enemy was clear, generals were ordering their troops to escape. Many successfully fled to the woods and the fields nearby, but just as many were caught by Letthe Mallo soldiers waiting to further decrease their ranks.

Ludovica, meanwhile, was starting to feel tired of stomping around for what seemed like an eternity. She was starting to feel weak again. Magic consumed a considerable amount of energy, and she had to eat to replenish it.

She didn't want to be seen in the cannibalistic action in front of her own people. But if she had to sustain herself, there was no other option. She caught a handful of soldiers and she started swallowing them. She tossed them in her mouth two by two, and fed on them relentlessly. Many of the unfortunate men ended up swallowed by the princess, digested to become nourishment for her young and shapely body.

She seemed to know no fulfillment, capturing their lot with her long, dexterous fingers, and throwing them in her gaping mouth, hearing their desperate cries as they were forced into the depths of her digestive system.

An hour had passed since the attack had been thrown on the capital, and it could be already called unsuccessful. The army was retreating, certainly to never come back again. The castle had been protected by Ludovica. She knew she had succeeded, and positioned herself on the ground to get a much needed rest.

Hours later, thousands of citizens had gathered around the sleeping girl to give her their blessings. They formed crowds around her naked body and started celebrating her magnificent performance on the battlefield. Their lives had been spared, their city was perfectly intact; and although thousands who lived in the villages on the way from the capital to the border could not say the same thing, in the kingdom reigned an atmosphere of joy.

When Ludovica awoke, she noticed the incredible crowd that had gathered all around her, and she heard their cheers.

The young woman could barely move, for if she did so, she would've ended many of her subjects’ lives.

Upon realizing the situation, she spoke. "Thank you, my people, for having come to me, but this is not the moment to celebrate yet; I, and I alone, shall march to their lands, to get a much-needed revenge; and I will come back with their king's head, I promise to all of you."

“I pray that you allow me to move, for I need to leave for my destination before the sun sets”, said the young woman among the cheers of the crowd. Immediately, hundreds began to move away from her body, forming a passage that allowed her to walk freely towards the kingdom of Adde Crohlo, more than one hundred kilometers away from the capital.

To make the walk less burdensome, the princess, to the amazement of the onlookers, let herself grow ten times larger than she already was, her body becoming far more imposing than the already huge size it had reached; and as her naked behind could be seen for miles, as the young lady walked to the border, her shadow covered the whole capital. From her spot in the castle, her mother looked at her with impotent rage and unadmitted jealousy.

Nature called as Ludovica walked to the faraway kingdom, and she felt the need to relieve herself. As she placed her foot in front of a dead village, watching with disgust the damage the enemy army had caused, she wondered if she should have shrank herself before pissing, so as to not flood the ground below. But she decided that such an action would have left her an easy target for any enemy soldier passing by; and so she started relieving herself in the open fields, creating a small marsh in the zone she had chosen.

Then, after cleaning herself up with some dirt she gathered from the ground (not realizing she had picked up a few microscopic escaping soldiers as well, who were smeared on her hairy pussy), she walked further, finally arriving at the border.

She made no point of avoiding any damage. She simply did not care if her foot was landing on a village, on a river, on a field, or on whatever was on her path. She did not deliberately step on them, either: she simply walked directly to the capital, choosing the fastest route that would take her there.

"I thought it was just a legend," said the king upon seeing the giant princess approaching. His advisor was paralyzed. “My deepest apologies, sir,” he said. “This is all my fault. I will accept whatever punishment you will send my way.”

“Punish you?” asked the king. “Look at her.” He pointed at the beautiful girl getting closer with each second, her footsteps shaking the earth. “We will all get what’s due to us in no time.”

Ludovica glanced at the tiny city. Most buildings in there were no larger than a grain of rice to her. And the people were just specks, unworthy of her attention. The castle was the only structure that could, somehow, compare to her, although it still paled in front of her gigantic body.

She had to admit that it was architecturally, beautiful, perhaps more so than her own. It almost pained her to destroy such a majestic structure. Had its ruler not acted so foolishly, the matter could have been solved with diplomacy, and the long period of peace enjoyed by their kingdoms could have been protracted.

It was too late for that now. The castle laid before her as small as one of her toes, but for her plan, she had to make herself even bigger. She concentrated and used her power to make herself another hundred times bigger. Now her size was simply unfathomable. She could be seen from faraway lands, and everyone in her home town could admire her and her incredible size. What’s more, the entire capital of Adde Chrohlo now stood on the ground, contained by its now useless walls, as a tiny circle on the ground, its diameter about six centimeters long.

The princess crouched on the ground and let her ass fall right above the city. From it, a long, slimy piece of shit started to come out, eventually separating from her body and landing right on the capital, covering it completely. Its hit was powerful enough that the shockwaves it sent were felt by everyone in Letthe Mallo, including the queen who lightly bounced at the earthquake.

Ludovica smirked, seeing how the evil king was now buried under her waste, a mountain sized piece of shit that was composed in a good percentage of the very people he had sent to die, the poor soldiers he had mobilized, and that turned out to be the true victims of his greedy expansionist project.

That was history now. Knowing that if left unchecked, the shit would have sent unthinkable plagues and blights on the lands nearby, Ludovica used up her powers to shrink the awfully smelling turd, as well as the city that it had buried. The few survivors in the city reached the size of bacteria as a Ludovica now millions of times larger than them looked at the dusk sky with newfound hope.

The dark-haired princess reached a more manageable size to come back home. The next few days she spent resting in bed, recovering, while in the whole kingdom, people celebrated her heroic acts.

The moment she returned to the castle, she was greeted by her awed servants; but her mother was as cold as possible to her.

“You have failed me, for you have betrayed my trust; I would banish you to a faraway land, but I cannot do so, because the people now see you as their savior, and an uprising would quickly start if the queen were to punish her foolish daughter. So, by the people’s will, you shall stay, and you shall take my place and crown when I will step aside; but know that despite the circumstances force me to act this way, you shall not receive my forgiveness, nor my motherly approval,” she told her a few days later.

Ludovica decided to bear with her mother’s harsh words, as she knew deep in her heart, but would not admit, that the woman secretly envied the powers she had not inherited from her mother and that sprouted, instead, inside her since she had been a child.

The day the princess made her, and everyone else in the continent, look like a bug, she felt defeated, knowing that it was no longer only in her magic powers that she surpassed her, but also in character, and now, in the affection of her own people.

In our technological times, magic has gone extinct, and tales such as those of Ludovica are not believed, and shared as mere fairytales. But in my village, which hundreds of years ago was part of the ancient kingdom of Letthe Mallo, this story has been passed through generations as fact. I have heard of it from my grandfather, who was told by his own grandfather, and so on.

Perhaps it is for the best that human beings capable of reaching huge sizes are now extinct. Who can tell? Even noble souls like Ludovica can and will get tainted by such infinite power. We live in days where the exercise of power is often subtler, and can often escape our grasp. Some long for those simpler days, where humanity lived a humbler, but more natural life. As for me, I am only a mere passerby, willing to share this and other stories with whomever is going to listen. It is not for me to judge, or decide, of anything at all.

(the end)